One of the small permanent advantages of working in a bookshop is that you know what is coming. Publishers' catalogues arrive two and three seasons ahead; advance reading copies land months before publication; the trade reviews run well before the on-sale date. Booksellers spend their working lives about six months in the future.
New and Noteworthy — the store's "what's new" page — existed to pass that advantage on. Its premise, stated plainly at the top of the page for years, was that a well-informed reader is a happy reader, and that customers did not have the benefit of the publishers' catalogues to browse through. So the shop browsed them and reported back.
Note: the original page reproduced trade-review text under licence to the store. That material is not carried forward into this archive; what follows describes how the list was built.
How the list was assembled
The list was organised by category — debut fiction, general fiction, thriller and mystery, science fiction and fantasy, and non-fiction — and it was rebuilt every season. Each entry named the book, the author, the publisher and the month of publication, and then said what the book was.
The categories tell you something about the store. Debut fiction came first. That is not a commercial ordering: debuts are the hardest books to sell, carry the least name recognition and get the smallest marketing spend. Putting them at the head of the list is an editorial statement about what an independent bookshop is for, and it is consistent with everything else the store did — the small-press promotion, the reading series built around emerging authors, the local-author shelf.
What forward-looking lists are good for
A "coming soon" list does a specific job that a bestseller list cannot. It lets a reader:
- Plan. Book groups choose titles two or three months out and need to know what will be available in paperback by then.
- Follow authors rather than charts. The single most common question at any bookshop counter is whether a particular writer has anything new coming.
- Catch debuts before the noise. By the time a first novel is a phenomenon, discovering it is no longer interesting. The window is the three months before publication, and that window is only visible from inside the trade.
What the categories revealed
A seasonal list broken into five categories is also a portrait of a shop's customers, and this one is legible. Debut fiction first, general fiction second, then thriller, mystery and suspense as a single large block, science fiction and fantasy as a smaller one, and non-fiction last but substantial.
That ordering does not match national sales, in which crime and thriller titles dominate and debut literary fiction is a rounding error. It matches the shop's stated view of itself — and it is a fair description of what a general independent bookshop in a New England city of this size actually needed to be good at: the commercial categories to pay the rent, the literary categories to justify the existence.
What happened to it
The forthcoming-titles list is one of the few bookshop functions that the internet genuinely absorbed. Publishers now publicise their own lists directly, retail catalogues are searchable months ahead, and any reader can follow an author's announcements without a bookseller in between.
What did not transfer is the filtering. A seasonal catalogue contains several thousand titles; the store's list contained perhaps forty, chosen by people who had read a good proportion of them in proof and who knew which fifteen would matter to readers in this particular city. That editorial function is exactly the thing the algorithms replaced least well.
Related
The store's other recommendation streams are described on the staff picks, favourite-books and customer reviews pages. For current industry coverage of forthcoming publishing, the American Booksellers Association is the trade's own hub, and the New England Independent Booksellers Association aggregates regional bookseller enthusiasm the way this list once did locally.